


he will be dust

by a1hal



Category: CHRISTIE Agatha - Works, Ordeal By Innocence (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 04:11:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15477393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a1hal/pseuds/a1hal
Summary: It's more than just remorse and righteousness that drives Dr Arthur Calgary to want to clear Jack Argyll's name.





	he will be dust

His memory was near eidetic, back before the bomb. Not a detail out of place: exams only a matter of writing fast enough, words pouring from the pen like mercury, shimmering in a perfect mirror of his notes. Now it is a fractured thing: images glancing, flickering, gone. Shards of bitter truth on which he cuts his hands to ribbons, scrabbling in his own warm blood to piece together narrative from chaos.

One fact remains: Jack Argyll is dead. Because of him.

 

It is a narrow, such a narrow chance. As narrow as the chance this universe came to be, with its rigid laws and careful balance, that he destroyed with just a pen. If he had been wiser, he would never have done that awful work; if he had been stronger, after, he would not have been in that car, screeching to a halt before Jack’s upraised hands.

 

He asked the time, he thinks afterward, for the same reason he gave Jack a lift. Snatching at normality, at any scrap of human contact; desperate for a crumb of life, reality, anything but bare white walls and silent, terrifying nurses. Not that he had anywhere to be, except back _there_. But it was a few more words, a few more moments, to stretch out in his memory when he is locked up and alone again.

He didn’t know those moments would be with him all his life.

 

The clock is still striking, and he is still sat there, engine running, staring at the bright lights through the fog, thinking of beer and laughter and the spill of music from the open door. And staring at the man who walks toward it, thinking other things. Watching as he stops, somehow feeling Arthur’s eyes upon him; maybe hearing the car still idling when Arthur should be on his way. He turns, half-lit, half-shadowed in the doorway; watches Arthur look away, fumble with the steering wheel, pretend to stall or crunch the gears or whatever it is cars do when they go wrong.

There are footsteps, and he is leaning back into the open window, as Arthur finds intriguing things to look at on the cracked leather of the dashboard of his stolen car.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

 

“You’re buying first,” he says, amusedly, as he’s said everything in the increasingly one-sided conversation to this point.

“I shouldn’t drink,” says Arthur automatically - the pills will still be strong inside him, for all that he can feel them ebbing, harsh winds and tides of the world beginning to seep through. Then remembers, taps the gearstick weakly, manages a watery smile.

“Oh well.” The door opens; the car shifts beneath his weight. “Get going, then. I’ll take you somewhere nice.”

 

 _Somewhere nice_ transpires to be a car mechanic’s workshop on the edge of town, a rundown cottage slumping like an afterthought just beyond the headlights’ gleam. Jack wrestles with the door, muttered curse words tumbling like his hair across his forehead; at last it gives, and Arthur stumbles after him until Jack finds a lantern and brings them _violent, destructive, catastrophic_ light.

“Are you alright upstairs?”

He glances up; the roof is barely yards away, dark rafters under slate. “I - I don’t know what - “

Jack rolls his eyes, puffs air between his teeth. “No, up _here_.” He reaches out, raps Arthur on the forehead, causing him to flinch, then eyes him wryly from beneath his tumbled hair. “You seem a bit... _distracted_ , shall we say.” A half-smile, fleeting, gone. “Don’t want to take advantage of an invalid.”

Arthur gropes and stammers; then all at once the words are on his lips unbidden, some Cambridge don’s pet aphorism trotting forth just like some priggish horse. 

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Jack’s laugh is sudden, loud, _explosive_ , making Arthur jerk and stumble back; Jack catches at his wrist and steadies him, more ways than one. Now Arthur’s hair is in his eyes, and he pushes it away with the hand Jack’s not still holding.

“I’m fine,” he says, and then again, more forceful than he means, “I’m _fine_ ,” as if mere words could exorcise his demons. But Jack just drops his hand, and shrugs, unruffled.

“Sure, then. Want to fuck?”

 

Charmingly uneven features and a sweep of dark hair angle down to meet a crooked smile that at once challenges and pleads a little, promising and hoping.

“Why?”

He shrugs, one-shouldered, like it’s nothing. “I like to fuck.” Steps closer. “And you make me laugh.” His mouth hardens, just a little; his eyes flash, flick downward and away. “And you look at me like I’m a _person_ , not some fucking _puppy_ that’s been pissing on the carpet.”

A story there - but Arthur has already nodded his consent distractedly, and Jack is shrugging off his coat and kicking off his shoes, entirely heedless where they fall. 

 

He is whipcord-lean beneath his clothes, long adolescent limbs with wiry muscle strung along them like an afterthought. Smooth as a boy and honey-white as Jersey cream, smelling of cigarettes, cheap whisky and something else beneath, faint musks of heather-sweat and sex. He kisses fiercely, filthily, so Arthur hardly catches breath before his mouth is there again, a challenge to be met or fall before. His hands are everywhere, while Arthur’s rest so gingerly on his shoulders, barely touching for all the fear of world and time. But now Arthur’s clothes are off and he stands exposed, mad-house pyjamas pooling at his feet, his body thin with waste and surely marked with all the shocks and shackles of his shame.

Jack barely seems to notice; cold stone scrapes over Arthur’s back as he is pushed against the wall for more gulping, dizzying kisses, hands pinned above his head while Jack’s body moves against him, so _hot_ after the ice baths and the freezing cell. A breath at last, Jack’s cock hot and hard against his own, Jack’s tongue tracing down his jawline to his ear.

“How d’you like to be fucked?”

“Hard,” he manages at last, stammering a little, though this does at least have the virtue of being true.

One good truth.

 

Jack takes him at his word, uncaring who hears what. Hair oil from his pocket and a pair of practised fingers - practised, but not _gentle_ , and Arthur bites his cheek to keep from swearing as they dig and twist inside him. Then he is looking at Jack’s crooked grin and forgetting how to breathe because there isn’t room for breath with Jack inside him, or time between the thrusts that bring strange noises to his lips that he has never heard, and he can only cling to Jack and wrap his legs around him tighter, urging _yes_ and _more_ and _harder_ while the heat between them builds to detonation.

His fingers find Jack’s chest, the two small peaks there, and _twists_ them, hard enough to hurt; instead of the expected yell, Jack laughs aloud and lunges forward, even deeper than before, so he sees stars and shudders somewhere deep inside.

“That’s the spirit,” Jack murmurs in his ear, and sets his teeth at the crook of Arthur’s neck and _bites_ him, hard; the cry is driven from his lungs as Jack redoubles, faster still, impossibly, like a tireless piston on a steam train, driven by some pressure beyond explaining. Arthur’s fingers scrabble at his back, his nurse-clipped nails too short to scratch; at last he wraps his fingers in Jack’s hair and pulls, but this too only yields a chuckle and swift pinning of his hands above his head, so he can only writhe and nip when glistening flesh comes close enough to reach.

Then he is on his knees, Jack in him from behind, one hand braced beneath him while the other grabs and flails. Jack’s fingers in his hair, his mouth, raking at his chest, Jack’s own pressed sweaty on his back while his hand finds Arthur’s cock and matches tempo with his blurring hips. Jack’s teeth tugging at his ear, adding scrape and sting to others fighting for attention spent elsewhere - the ache and clench, the building tension, sweat and breath and gasp and thrust -

“Roll over” - and he is underneath again, Jack in him swifter than a breath, Jack’s mouth on his, Jack’s hand between his legs, all movements building to crescendo, terrible, inexorable, building, building, _building_ -

 

“There was a man, once,” Jack says, as lightly as if mentioning the weather, “and he hurt me, for a while, and then he stopped.” His mouth quirks, sudden, utterly humourless. “And I don’t know which was worse.” He turns, then, somehow more naked, now, despite the coat across them both.

“I found out who my mother is today.”

 

He never hears those stories; not from Jack’s own lips, at least, for they are stopped by clay when at last the truth comes spilling out. But for now it is Arthur’s lips that close them on those secrets, Arthur’s mouth that murmurs _ssh_ to hold the breath, the life, the flash before they all are dust.

He will be dust, when Arthur has at last endured the shocks and torments long enough to satisfy.  
He will be dust, when Arthur lies here in this hotel bed, keening with the knowledge that he could have saved him.  
He will be dust, beneath a wooden marker in an unkept grave, cursed as a murderer and damned into the cold, wet ground.

But for now he is a spar in the ocean to a drowning man, and they hold each other: loosely, leaving space for the great gulf of history, trauma, fear that yawns between them, until Jack laughs - ironically, bitterly, defiantly - and pulls him close at last.

And then they hear the sirens.


End file.
